The front page

Today’s top story:

New Speech Therapy Device at WLU Is ‘Lighting the Way’

This top-of-the-page article is about West Liberty University’s Speech and Hearing Behavioral Health Clinic acquiring a rehabilitation device to aid its work with speech therapy and dementia patients. It is an interesting feature article but how is this today’s most important news story? It isn’t; worse, it’s not even a recent story. The clinic’s Facebook page states that the device arrived on February 13. (By the way, the article misspells the product: its “tovertafel” not “tovartafel.”)

Additionally, on the front page is

Wheeling’s David Robinson Named West Virginia Elks Northern District Deputy

Congrats, David, but this is not front-page news. And, how about:

Youth Services System ‘Celebrate Youth’ Festival Is Aug. 1

Finally, there was one AP story:

Americans Are Losing Billions To Scammers

Did nothing happen in the world? The nation? The state? Locally? What a terrible front page.

The editorial page

The lead editorial tells us:

Capito Is Always Working For Us

And it begins:

It’s good to have friends, and West Virginians know they’ve got someone they can rely on in Washington. U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., continues to use her experience to serve Mountain State residents wherever she can find the opportunity.

With slight changes to the second (changing “this week” to “recently”) and last paragraphs, this is the same editorial that ran in many of Ogden’s West Virginia papers two months ago. (By the way, Capito’s Senate page featured that version here while today’s Intelligencer version was posted earlier today. For Capito, it’s a two-for-one.)

The editorial does nothing but praise the senator. Of course it does – I cannot remember an editorial, or for that matter, any article that hasn’t. (Can any reader recall Ogden ever criticizing Capito?)

The second editorial, “Target Repeat Offenders,” is yet another irrelevant Ohio editorial that made its first appearances in Ogden’s Ohio papers two months ago. The editorial praises a bill which targets second offenders that use a gun. I checked on the bill and since its introduction in early May, the legislation which was assigned to committee, has not moved. So why then are the Intelligencer’s West Virginia readers reading about Ohio legislation that is going nowhere? Simple, it fills up newspaper space – that’s all that matters to Ogden on a Monday.

Two very anti-Biden columns (Larry Elder and Ben Shapiro), a commentary on a movie, and a surprising political cartoon questioning Trump and Project 2025 make up the rest of the page.

At a certain point this may become difficult to assess, but I think the Monday Wheeling Intelligencer continues to get worse by the week.